Can You Hold Contradictory Thoughts in Your Mind?

Congratulations, you have ‘negative capability’

We live in an uncertain world. Nothing haunts humans more than uncertainty. Embracing life’s unpredictability is a tough task that we avoid to the extent possible. We prefer the security of unambiguous beliefs and worldviews to the insecurity of doubt and confusion.

We try to make sense of the world through the prism of opinions and beliefs. Confirmation bias leads to keep company with people who share our views and beliefs. We land at the news that only confirms our pre-existing beliefs.

Open-mindedness, a character trait that enables us to be receptive to unique shades of opinion, and the ability to change our minds when we find fresh evidence, is hard to reconcile with the fetishization of certainty.

Misinformation and disinformation thrive in social media thanks to our vulnerability to form firm opinions about everything.

We consider the holding of contradictory opinions in our minds as a sign of mental weakness. We have even pathologized the ability to consider opposing views as ‘cognitive dissonance’.

Great minds have always been full of doubts and skepticism. The scientist is never certain about their hypotheses. They know that their theories are falsifiable.

“There are no facts, only interpretations.” (Friedrich Nietzsche )

What we call cognitive dissonance is not a mental flaw or disorder; it is a great virtue if we accept uncertainty and unresolved questions of life.

We can reframe a skeptical mind’s acceptance of ambiguity as ‘negative capability’ a term coined by the 19th-century English romantic poet John Keats who used the expression as a counter to fellow poet Coleridge’s pursuit of certainty in defining the concept of beauty.

In a letter to a friend Keats defines negative capability as “that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainty, Mysterious, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Keats was not advocating the abandonment of fact and reason; he was merely cautioning us against the mad pursuit of objectivity as an end and not as a means to make sense of the complex world. Confirmation bias ensures that we look for information that reinforces our existing beliefs rather than making us change our views.

We must stop searching for the ‘Truth’. Some of life’s mysteries are incomprehensible. Life’s imponderables defy logical reasoning. What we call truth is often a myth that humanity has created to ensure peaceful collective living.

We are a post-truth species

It is not that we have so far been living in a truth-mediated era and have suddenly chosen to live in a post-truth world. Over the eons, humans have cooperated by collectively believing in myths. Ideologies, religions, and institutions like governments, nations, and currency notes are human-made constructs. They gain legitimacy because everybody believes them as real. The problem is over time humans believed that myths are the reality. This conflation of stories as facts seems to be the basis for identity-creation.

History is full of violence perpetrated in the name of defending ideologies and religions. What is different now is that the Internet and social media have amplified the differences through the incessant creation of digital content geared towards deepening people’s prejudices and exacerbating their cognitive biases.

In his “21 Lessons for the 21st Century”, author Yuval Noah Harari has said: “The truth is that truth was never high on the agenda of Homo Sapiens. Many people assume that if a particular religion or ideology misrepresents reality its adversaries are bound to discover it sooner or later, because they will not be able to compete with more clear-sighted rivals. Well, that’s just another comforting myth. On practice, the power of human cooperation depends on a delicate balance between truth and fiction.”

Ambiguity threatens our sense of coherence about life. The search for certitude traps us in cocoons of exclusivity and exceptionalism. Embracing ambiguity can make us comfortable with the mysteries of the universe.

Doubting belongs to a healthy mind

To be in a state of doubt is not a weakness; it is a sign of intellectual rigour. It is like the paradigm of the scientific method open to distinct possibilities.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.” –

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Not that we hold opposing views all at once; we hold them in different corners of the mind where they coexist without causing mental confusion and tension.

Believe in God? Fine. Sometimes the mind turns agnostic or non-believing in a greater force. That’s okay.

“Doubt is not the opposite of faith, it is one element of faith.” (Paul Tillich )

By practising negative capability we can be our own devil’s advocate and question our assumptions and conclusions before they solidify into the firm and immutable beliefs.

Negative capability is cultivating agnosticism as armour against falsehood and arrogance. Knowing that we do not know everything about everything under the sun is a sign of wisdom.

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” (Bertrand Russell )

Thanks for reading.